October was dry and 2 degrees warmer than usual
Author: Michaël Torfs

Thu 02/11/2017 - 11:06Michaël TorfsThe past month of October was particularly dry and temperatures were more than 2 degrees Celsius above normal. This was announced by the Belgian Met Office KMI. "The temperatures are abnormal. This doesn't happen very often, but we have got used to it in times of global warming", the Belgian weather presenter Frank Deboosere says.

The overall average temperature was at 13.3 Celsius in Ukkel, compared to 11.1 Celsius normally (calculated on the averages of the past centuries). Not only the maximum temperature was higher than usual (16.4 compared to 14.7) but we also had particularly mild nights (10.1 compared to 7.8 Celsius).

Another sign of the global warming was the fact that October had five so-called "spring days", i.e. days with a maximum temperature of at least 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit). Normally, this is 2.4 days on average. 16 October set an all-time record with 25.7 degrees Celsius.

Here comes the sun (but not so much at the coast and in Brussels)

Rainfall was only at 43.1 millimetres, while 74.5 is used as the average reference. Another remarkable statistic was the number of hours of sunshine, which was actually quite unequally divided between the different places in Belgium (see below). The coast, the capital and eastern regions had particularly less sunshine than the rest. Ukkel and Brussels residents had to be content with just 97 hours, compared to 112 hours normally.